Still and sparkling

I LOVE getting (a little bit) sick

Hello, everyone. I have had a cold since roughly Friday night last week. It has been glorious.

I love getting sick. Obviously I don’t mean “vomiting-all-night” sick or “can’t-sit-up-without-getting-dizzy” sick or “someone please take me to the hospital RIGHT NOW” sick, but just the kind where you feel pleasantly weak and sleepy, and you need to stay home from work and drink lots of fluids. You don’t shower and you watch hours upon hours of something on Netflix that doesn’t require you to think too much. If you are lucky, someone who cares about you will bring you cough drops and make you tea. It is wonderful.

I am not a trooper when I am sick, either. I am not the person who puts on a brave face and goes “Well, I’ve got a fever of 102, but never mind, there’s work to be done!” I don’t think I am particularly whiny, but as soon as my throat gets a little bit scratchy I gulp the Nyquil and put myself to bed.

Getting sick means I can read and watch TV and scroll through Twitter for hours on end and it’s fine. JD brings the cats in and forces them to snuggle me.

Guys, I haven’t worked out in over a week and it’s GREAT. I don’t care.

My advice to you: take overly good care of yourself when you are sick, if you have the means to do so. Call off work or school (the people you interact with will thank you, btw), and make yourself an enormous pot of tea. Wrap yourself in thirty raggedy old blankets and pass out on the couch with Bob’s Burgers blaring from the TV. Drop your used Kleenex on the floor, like a disgusting troglodyte. Wake up from a two-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon and spend the next 45 minutes staring blankly at your phone. Eat EVERYTHING you want and tell yourself it’s because your body needs nutrients, which is true, even if cake balls don’t count as nutrients.

When night comes, treat yourself to a fresh set of pajamas, because you’ve been wearing the same sweats for 48 hours. Go to bed and sleep for another 12 hours. It’s fine! What are you, some CEO? No you are not. You don’t have to be the hero today.

No one cares if you force yourself to DO ALL THE THINGS while sick, and if you make a big deal about how you’re slogging through even though you look and sound like death, that’s annoying. So give in. Be lazy. Call everything off. Your head is full of snot and no one wants you around anyway. ENJOY IT.

(By the way, sorry for using a still from An Affair to Remember for this, Deborah Kerr’s character is not really sick but just a little bit paralyzed from the waist down and Cary Grant LOVES HER ANYWAY on account of not being a monster, but mostly I just like to imagine that her on the couch is what I look like when I have a cold, even though it’s 100% inaccurate.)